I hope you find my little Infograph on “How to Create a Drop Shadow” helpful. The intent here is to get you started. There is a lot more you can do with this idea, including adding a little blur to it. Have some fun with it and see what you can come up with.

I can’t seem to find time to get posts done lately. But, if you’d like to see what I’ve been doing with Inkscape lately, take a look at my online store here, or my Facebook pages here and here. If you like what I have to share, please “Like” my Facebook pages.

I’ve been having fun trying out some sketches on fabric using a pen in my KNK Zing. I have learned that drawing to make things look good is one thing, but drawing to make them sketch out correctly (or cut )….. is quite another. I have taken some of my previous designs and re-worked them for this purpose. It has been a bit of trial and error, but I think I am getting the hang of it.

When I first tried this, I sent a PNG to my software and traced it. Look closely at the image of the Fan Club bag I made. I think it turned out pretty cute, but you can see that the image was traced. See all the double lines?

Fan Club

I have since learned that I can send my SVG directly to MTC, or save it as a DXF and send to Silhouette. Now what was I thinking! This makes so much more sense and produces a much better result! But…. I have to make sure things are drawn correctly….. no crossing lines, etc.

Another problem I had sketching on fabric was getting the fabric to adhere to the mat and stay put during the sketching process. However, Kay Hall at cleversomeday.wordpress.com created a great tutorial and suggested using freezer paper on the back of the fabric for stability. With this method there is no need to use a mat.

Here are a couple of projects I worked on today. Not perfection….. but I like them much better!

Here is an infograph showing various ways to use the same basic illustration. The intent here is not to instruct in the various techniques, but rather to help you brainstorm some ideas.

None of the illustrations here have been drawn or cut out at this time so it is possible they need a little editing. However, I wanted to give you some suggestions that you can build on. For those of you that have less experience with Inkscape, I hope to add more tutorials in the future that give additional information about how to accomplish these results.